Today is the 2nd Sunday of Advent. Advent, as I mentioned last week, means the coming or the arrival. Historically, Advent has been a time for Christians to reflect on the meaning of the coming of Christ. And that is what I am trying to help us do over these 4 Sundays of Advent.
Last week, we considered whether there was a genuine need for Advent. Sometimes people will come up with great plans or ideas to do something, to sponsor something, but the question is - Is there a need? Because many times they are great ideas, but there’s just not a need for their idea to be put into action. Well, was there a need for the advent of Christ? As we considered Scripture’s testimony in Romans 3 we came to the conclusive decision that there was a great need, a desperate need for Advent because we are sinners by nature & thus sin has corrupted our character, has defiled our conversation & has perverted our conduct.
Knowing then that there is this great need, which began back in Genesis 3 when man & woman sinned in the Garden, God while at the same time dealing with His sinful creation & pronouncing a series of curses on this world & its inhabitants also made a promise. He made a promise that 1 day, one would come that would make right what had been made wrong by Adam & Eve. One would come that would deal with sin that had now become part of man’s nature & would make it possible for mankind to once again walk with & have a relationship with a holy, righteous & perfect God. And so the subject we want to consider on this 2nd Sunday of Advent is - The Promise of Advent. We have established that there is a need for Advent & now flowing out of that need let’s reflect on the promise that God made of the advent of Christ in order to meet that need.
Now in thinking about the promise of Advent, that God was going to send Christ, where would you go to begin studying this topic? Genesis 3:15 right? That is the 1st mention in the Bible of the advent or coming of Christ even though he is not specifically named as Christ at that point. It just says that the woman’s seed will bruise the serpent’s head - but that is where you should begin, right? Wrong! The place you want to start in thinking about the promise of Advent is in a verse in the NT.
-Ephesians 1:3-4 - This verse predates Genesis 3:15, not in terms of when it was written but in terms of when it is talking about. It predates Genesis 3:15 for it is speaking about before man, the earth, & the universe were created & therefore before Adam & Eve sinned.
I want you to think about what the implications of this verse means - that God chose you knowing that you would be a sinner & therefore in need of Him paying for your sins. The implication then is that the original promise of Advent was made before anything that we know of today was created and since no being had been created yet, God made that promise of Advent to Himself.
Sometimes you make decisions not really knowing what you are getting yourself into - right? "Oh brother, are you right? Let me tell you how right you are." And we’ve all had those experiences & could share some horror stories this morning. Projects you thought might take a couple of hours ended up taking all day or more. But this was not true of God. He knew exactly what He was getting Himself into, what He was committing Himself to.
I’m sure you have also experienced this: sometimes we consider doing a project or maybe we have something that is broken & in need of repair. And when we are challenged to do the project or think about repairing the broken item, as we evaluate the project our response can be, "No, it’s not worth the effort & the time. It’s just not worth the effort." And so you don’t do it or you throw the broken item away & buy a new one. It is amazing to me, in light of human history & its rejection & rebellion against God that God didn’t say, back then before the foundations of the world that, "it’s just not worth the effort." It is amazing & humbling to me in light of my history, my failure, my stubbornness, my selfishness - it is amazing to me in light of my history that God did not say, "he’s not worth the effort." Could the same thing be said of you?
A minister one day sat in the vestry of his church to meet anyone who might have spiritual difficulties. Only one came. "What is your difficulty?" asked the minister. The man answered, "My difficulty is the ninth chapter of Romans, where it says, ’Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated,’" "Yes," said the minister, "there is great difficulty in that verse; but which part of the verse is difficult for you?" The latter part, of course," said the man. "I cannot understand why God should hate Esau." The minister replied, "That verse has often been difficult, but my difficulty has always been with the first part of the verse. I never could understand how God could love that wily, deceitful scoundrel Jacob."
And when you begin to comprehend this truth, it forces you to say that God’s choosing of you was all His doing & had nothing to do with you & your goodness & your worth for if your devotion to Him was the consideration in God choosing you, any logical person would say that it is not worth the effort. Yet because of who God is, he said it is worth the effort, it is worth the cost.
Entertainer Garrison Keilor recalls the childhood pain of being chosen last for the baseball teams. “The captains are down to their last grudging choices: a slow kid for catcher, someone to stick out in right field where nobody hits it. They choose the last ones two at a time—"you and you"—because it makes no difference. And the remaining kids—the scrubs, the excess—they deal for us as handicaps. "If I take him, then you gotta take him," they say.
Sometimes I go as high as sixth, usually lower. But just once I’d like Darrel to pick me first and say, "Him! I want him! The skinny kid with the glasses & the black shoes. You, c’mon!" But I’ve never been chosen with much enthusiasm.”
Some of you know exactly what he is talking about, don’t you?
I’ve got exciting news for you today. You are so valuable to God he chose you early—with enthusiasm even though He was fully aware of all your handicaps & what it would cost Him.
How many of you, would be inclined to make a promise if somehow you were able to know in advance the incredible hardship, inconvenience, suffering, disappointment, rejection, mocking, & slander on your name & character that having to keep that promise would cost you. If you could know that, how many of you would make that promise? I doubt I would. Many times it’s impossible to get people to promise something when you have put the best face on it as possible. Yet that is exactly what God did. The all-wise & loving God, knowing fully what it would cost Him made the promise. In the council of the Godhead, the Father, Son & HS made that promise - to create us with free will knowing that we would reject Him & He would need to come & buy us back, redeem us through the death of Jesus Christ.
He chose you before the foundation of the world & by choosing you committed Himself at that point to coming into this world as a baby & to grow up to be despised & rejected & put to death by the people He created & loved in order to pay their penalty. I want to tell you something, if there was someway to make a movie using the plot of the Bible & redemption & somehow disguise it so that people did not recognize it as the story of the Bible - think about the mixed emotions people would have who saw it. Anger - that people could so wickedly reject one who had so great a love for someone. Love, joy - for the sacrificial love shown in the story. It would have to win best picture. What has happened is we have read this story so much in a religious context that we have lost the incredible drama that is involved.
But please understand that God didn’t create Adam & Eve unaware of what they were going to do. And then when they chose sin, the Godhead did not group together & have an emergency meeting & one of them say, "Well, what should we do now?" "What are our options?" And another one say, "Well, we could..." & then present the program of redemption. No, this was all foreseen & decided upon before even the first act of creation took place.
As I said, if you could take this story & put it in any other context, our response would be, "what a fool a person would be to reject so great of love & to reject it from such a wonderful person."
God chose you before the foundation of the world & by doing so, committed Himself to the Advent or the coming of Jesus into this world. And so everything we read about in the Bible, from Genesis 1:1 to Revelation 22:21 flows from this decision, commitment & promise that was made before the foundation of the world, before anything was created. And if you are going to talk about the promise of Advent, you have to start way back then, not in Gen.3:15 - that’s just the 1st time it was told to a human, it had been made long before that day.
Hymn - ’Tis Not That I Did Choose Thee
Can you remember when someone made you a promise, a very special promise - it was a promise that involved something in the future. And can you remember the anticipation of waiting for that day when the promise would be fulfilled. Maybe you will have to go back to your childhood to remember those emotions of great anticipation, the anticipation of waiting for a promise to come to pass. I think it would be hard to find 2 people who anticipated a fulfillment of a promise more than Adam & Eve. Sometimes we kind of just breeze past Adam & Eve not really giving much thought to what their situation was like or if we do we think of it only in negative terms in connection with them bringing sin into the world. And so I would like to help you think a little about them in connection with this promise God made to them in Genesis 3:15 & the anticipation that must have been theirs because of this promise.
Who has not read in Genesis about God walking in the cool of the day with Adam & Eve & not been a little envious & longed to be able to do such a thing. What an exciting thing if God came at the end of each day, personally, visibly & walked & talked with you - just took a walk & chatted, shared. But it stopped after they sinned.
Sometimes I wonder if Adam & Eve fully comprehended how badly they had messed up. I wonder if anyone could have anticipated the promise of the coming one as much as Adam & Eve. They are the only ones in the entire history of mankind, to have as it were, a before & after picture. The only ones to have seen a world perfect, to have seen people perfect, to have seen themselves perfect, to have seen creation in perfect harmony with its creator & then “bam” - to see the after picture, to see creation changed, to see the ground cursed, the serpent cursed, to see the change in their own hearts, to see their children as they began to grow up & to observe the selfishness & the sin in them, to see their son killing another of their sons. Can anything be as tragic as that? But not only that - to know now, where they did not know at one time, the vileness in their own hearts that had not been there at one point in their lives. They definitely, maybe more than anybody else, appreciated & longed for the coming of that seed of the woman more than anybody else in history.
Maybe no one else in history has had a fuller understanding of just how desperately we needed to be saved from sin. Sometimes we just pass so quickly over Adam & Eve & don’t stop to think of what must have been going through their minds through all this. I don’t know what kind of people they were like after they sinned, but if anybody was ever a candidate for deep regret it was those 2 people. I don’t know if they lived with a guilty conscience or not. I just don’t see how they could not have. It makes you wonder whenever they would walk around & see people sinning or hear about some wrong act being committed, remember they lived some 900+ yrs. so they saw quite a bit of wickedness. You wonder if every time they saw or heard of this if it didn’t just pierce them in a certain way, knowing that in one sense they were the cause of what was happening.
I wonder how often they reflected back on God’s promise to them in Genesis 3:15 & longed for the day when that promise would be fulfilled.
And now we instead of looking forward, look backward to the birth, life & death of Christ as He came in fulfillment of His promise. God chose you before the foundation of the world & that is why we celebrate this season for it was the fulfillment of that promise.
God chose you before the foundation of the world, but He didn’t choose you just so you could now live anyway you want. Continuing on in Eph.1:4 - "He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy & blameless before Him."
He chose us. He is also the one who makes us holy & blameless as He accepts the sacrifice of Christ on our behalf & as we put our trust in Christ, He imputes (credits) Christ’s righteousness to us. But then He calls us to walk according to the people that we now are - God’s holy children.
Eph 4:1 - I, therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, entreat you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called,
Col 1:10 - so that you may walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, to please Him in all respects,
But when you view this in light of Ephesians 1:4 & its implications as we have considered them today, the command to “walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called” or to live holy & godly lives is not something we grudgingly have to do but that we get to live like this which by the way is the best way to live & the most fulfilling way to live. And there ought to be such love, devotion & gratitude for what God did that it should be our delight to walk & live this way. That’s a different way of thinking about it, isn’t it? I wonder how many Christians think about living godly lives in that light? It shouldn’t be a burden, but rather a delight flowing out of deep gratitude & love.
But He chose you & He chose me that we might know Him, not know about Him or know of Him, but know personally, intimately the person of God. And in choosing you, He looked across the year from that point before the creation of anything & saw the desperate need you would be in because of sin. And in choosing you, He also chose to take the awful penalty of your sin upon himself so that you might be made new knowing full well all that would be involved in that choice.
He chose you before the foundation of the world & thus made the promise of the advent of Christ.
If that does not stir within your heart a response of praise & worship, love & humbleness – something is radically wrong. I urge you to spend some time this week reflecting on the Promise of Advent.
Chorus: “Oh, How He Loves You and Me”
